The controversy over Frank Gehry’s design for a “memorial park”
to President Eisenhower—a vast array of hideous metal walls,
covered with reflections on the President’s humble origins, and
mutilating (should it be built) an important public area of the
capital city—has alerted Americans to the difficulty, in modern
conditions, of obtaining an appropriate monument. Simple
gravestones commemorate private people, and are inscribed with
words of love from the few who will seriously miss them. Monuments,
however, do not only commemorate public figures who have deserved
well of the nation. They commemorate the nation, raise it above the
land on which it is planted, and express an idea of public duty and
public achievement in which everyone can share. Their meaning is
not “he” or “she” but “we.” And the successful monument does not
stand out as a defiance of the surrounding order, but endorses it
and adds to its grace and dignity.
Washington has many such monuments. But they belong (for the
most part) to another era, when architects and sculptors were
prepared humbly to retire behind their own creations, so as to
respect the city and its meaning. In proposing Gehry as the
architect of the Eisenhower memorial, however, Washington has opted
for another and newer conception of the architect’s role, and it is
important to understand this if we are to grasp the extent and
seriousness of their mistake. The Eisenhower family has objected to
the plans on the grounds that the resulting collection of screens
and narratives seem designed to belittle the former president, to
cut him down to size, to redesign him as the barefoot boy who
looked in wonder on the high office that miraculously came his way.
But this belittling of the subject is exactly what the monument
intends. By belittling the President the memorial would exalt its
architect. And the true subject of his memorial park, like the true
subject of every building that Gehry has ever built, would be
Gehry.
This, it seems to me, shows us the reason why monuments are
these days so hard to commission, and so invariably disappointing.
Architects, who once were servants of the people who employed them,
and conscious contributors to a shared public space, have rebranded
themselves as self-expressive artists, whose works are not designed
to fit in to a prior urban fabric, but to stand out as tributes to
the creative urge that gave rise to them. Their meaning is not “we”
but “I,” and the “I” in question gets bigger with every new
design.
Gehry belongs to a small and exclusive club of “starchitects,”
who specialize in designing buildings that stand out from their
surroundings, so as to shock the passerby and become causes
célèbres. They thrive on controversy, since it enables them to
posture as original artists in a world of ignorant philistines. And
their contempt for ordinary opinion is amplified by all attempts to
prevent them from achieving their primary purpose, which is to
scatter our cities with blemishes that bear their unmistakable
trademark. Most of these starchitects—Daniel Libeskind, Richard
Rogers, Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas—have equipped
themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledygook, with which to
explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive
it. And when people are spending public money they will be easily
influenced by gobbledygook that flatters them into believing that
they are spending it on some original and world-changing
masterpiece.
The most important feature of a Gehry “masterpiece,” like the
absurdly costly Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, is that it
“challenges” the surrounding order. Gehry does not build for
people, but sculpts a space for his own expressive ends. You see
this clearly in his Stata Center at MIT, a building that takes the
old ideas of wall and window and holds them up to ridicule, to
create a kind of collapsed caricature of a building, which is
already springing leaks and cracking at the joints. In a striking
monograph, Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber, former
president of Boston University, details all the faults of the
building, including its enormous cost overrun, and the expense of
maintaining it.
But by far the most telling criticism is one that can be leveled
at all the starchitects, who adopt the same a priori
approach to construction as Gehry, and also the same self-image of
themselves as revolutionary geniuses. Gehry decided that, since the
Stata building was to house the high-powered researchers that MIT
collects, and bring them together in a single space, he should
design an interior that encouraged them to interact, to share their
ideas, to amplify each other’s creativity by throwing concepts like
footballs from room to room. So he got rid of inner walls, made all
boundaries transparent, opened everything out in spaces that are
made stark and bleak by the childish supermarket colors that shout
from the open corridors.
This kind of a priori thinking, by an architect who has
never troubled to observe another member of his species, recalls Le
Corbusier’s plan for a hospital in Venice, in which there would be
no windows, and all doors would open inward, since this would
further the utter tranquility from which (according to the
architect) convalescence springs. In fact researchers need walls,
privacy, solitude if they are ever to produce the ideas that they
can then bounce off their colleagues, just as invalids need light,
air, and a view of the life outside, if ever they are to be
motivated to get better. The Stata Center therefore fulfils no
function as well as its primary one, which is to draw attention to
the person who created it.
Unfortunately, because we live in a celebrity culture, this
habit of megalomania seems to pay off. City fathers and public
bodies everywhere, faced with the need to commission a public
monument, will turn to the starchitects, sure that in this way they
will not be branded as philistines by the critics, and will be able
to fall back on a host of “expert” opinions should the general
public express dismay at their choice. And the more important the
project, the more likely it is that it will be put in the hands of
a starchitect, who will ensure that it stands out from its
surroundings and, if possible, reduces them to absurdity, so as the
better to draw attention to itself.
Recently I spent a few days in Budapest, a city that is full of
monuments. In every park some bearded gentleman stands serenely on
a plinth, testifying to the worth of Hungarian poetry, to the
beauty of Hungarian music, to the sacrifices made in some great
Hungarian cause. The monuments include bas-relief, incorporated
into the corner of some building, showing soldiers advancing into
war, or patriotic faces against a background flag. They include
classical colonnades linking buildings across the edge of a park,
and gateways lending dignity to a public street. None stands out,
none is designed to draw attention to itself. On the contrary, all
attention comes from the monuments, onto the city and the
people who live and move within their sight. They are like the eyes
of a father, resting on his children at play. They are full of the
joy of belonging, and convey a serene acceptance of death in the
national cause. Such monuments are the very opposite of the one
proposed by Gehry. Their sculptors and architects are forgotten,
their forms and materials are the forms and materials from which
the city around them is built. And they retire into their corners
as though in acknowledgement that their work has been done.
Now I firmly believe that there are architects and sculptors who
share that conception of the monument. For it is natural to all
patriotic people to wish for their past to be present in the city,
but in the way that memories are—as a shared recognition that we
owe gratitude to those who went before us, and must incorporate
them into our lives while respecting their dignity and
acknowledging their part in the national life. We must begin to
look for those more modest architects and sculptors, and to reject
the celebrity cult on which the great egos rely for their
commissions. For monuments should be built by people who have no
desire to draw attention to themselves, who are happy to hide
behind their creations, and to build things that belong where they
stand. It looks increasingly likely that the mistake made in
Washington will be rectified by Congress. But let us hope that it
will be the occasion to rectify a far greater mistake, which is
that of treating architecture as the expression of the architect’s
individual vision, rather than a contribution to our collective
home.
